PUBLISHING: AUTHOR WINS RECOGNITION LATE

By EDWIN McDOWELL

Published: November 16, 1984

This has been a rewarding autumn in the autumn of the life of Anthony Powell, the English novelist who in the 25 years from 1951 to 1976 wrote the longest novel in English - the 12-volume ''A Dance to the Music of Time.''

On Oct. 25, at the United States Embassy in London, Mr. Powell was given The Hudson Review's $15,000 Bennett Award, to honor ''a writer of significant achievement whose work has not received the full recognition to which it is entitled.'' And tonight, in a ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, he will be given in absentia the Ingersoll Foundation's $15,000 T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.

The Bennett Award, given every two years since 1976, was previously given to Jorge Guillen, the Spanish poet; Andrei D. Sinyavsky, the Russian writer; V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born author who lives in London, and Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. It was established by a special fund set up by friends of Joseph D. Bennett, who founded the literary quarterly in 1948 with Frederick Morgan, the current editor, and William Arrowsmith, the translator. Mr. Bennett, a retired investment banker, died in Australia in 1972.

The Eliot Award, which last year was won by Jorge Luis Borges, is sponsored by the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company in cooperation with the Rockford Institute in Illinois. At the same ceremony tonight, Russell Kirk, the conservative social critic, will be given the $15,000 Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters, which last year was won by James Burnham, another conservative social critic.

The 78-year-old Mr. Powell (whose name is pronounced POLL) will not be on hand tonight for the Eliot Award because he no longer feels up to long journeys. That is why the judges for the Bennett Award - Mr. Morgan; Roger Rosenblatt, the essayist for Time magazine, and William H. Pritchard, the biographer of Robert Frost - flew to London for the presentation.

But if age has lessened some of Mr. Powell's strength, it has not diminished his sense of humor. Mr. Rosenblatt said that when the novelist was introduced by an embassy official, who quipped that he wished Mr. Powell would learn to pronounce his own name properly, the author replied, ''I'd be glad to if only the Lowells of Massachusetts'' - with his British pronunciation it came out ''the LALLS of Massachusetts'' - ''would do the same.''

In one sense, Mr. Powell has been omnipresent in America for more than half a century - since 1932, to be exact, when his satirical first novel, ''Afternoon Men,'' was published here. Also published here were two Powell plays as well as four volumes of memoirs, beginning with ''Infants of the Spring'' (1977) and ending with ''The Strangers All Are Gone'' (1983).

The memoirs describe Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly and many other Powell friends and acquaintances. But critics generally agree that the Powell brilliance is best exhibited in the one million words that constitute his 25-year masterpiece, which began with the volume ''A Question of Upbringing'' and ended with ''Hearing Secret Harmonies.'' That chronicle, constituting an unparalleled social history of the British upper class in this century, is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, Mr. Powell's alter ego, who is a schoolboy in the first volume and ages along with his creator. The series takes its name from the painting by Nicolas Poussin, the noted 17th-century French neoclassicist, showing the Four Seasons dancing to the music of Time, depicted as a bearded old man.

The series contains some 300 characters in a group of trilogies, including a World War II trilogy, ''The Valley of Bones,'' ''The Soldier's Art'' and ''The Military Philosophers.'' The last volume in the war trilogy, which is also the ninth of the series, ranges from 1942 to the end of the war in Europe, by which time Jenkins has been transferred from a Welsh regiment to the British general staff in Whitehall.

Waugh considered Powell the equal of Proust, but with a better sense of humor, and Kingsley Amis called him the ''most brilliantly amusing and penetrating novelist we have.'' American critics have also praised him highly, and he is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

But his books, so filled with British manners and mores, never enjoyed big sales here - as the Bennett Award citation suggests. Still, almost all of them are still in print. And beginning next April, Popular Library will reprint ''A Dance to the Music of Time'' in mass market paperback, issuing one volume a month for an entire year.

An April Rebirth For Popular Library

Speaking of Popular Library, nothing had been heard from it for two years, or since Warner Books bought it from CBS. But now Warner will reinvigorate the imprint beginning in April, with Mr. Powell's ''Question of Upbringing'' along with titles by five other authors.

Popular Library started in 1942, reprinting whodunits, including books by Mary Roberts Rinehart and John Dickson Carr. Eventually it began issuing a little of everything, and in 1976 it won the Carey Thomas Award for distinguished fiction in mass-market publishing. By then, its authors included Mr. Powell, P. D. James, Harper Lee, Helen Van Slyke, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie, Taylor Caldwell and Anne Tyler.

The editorial director of Popular Library at the time of the Carey Thomas Award was Patrick O'Connor, now a senior editor at Warner Books. The editor in chief of the reborn imprint will be Kathleen Malley, executive editor of Warner Books. Popular Library will issue six titles a month, including those by Mr. Powell and some of the other name authors, along with original fiction, mysteries and two titles a month from a new Popular Library science fiction imprint, Questar.